The best thing I watched in the past year was an epically long movie about retired militants, but it wasn't One Battle After Another, the Oscar winner for Best Picture. It was The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary from 1969 about life in Nazi-occupied France. Reviewing the film in The Atlantic in 1972, David Denby called it 'one of the greatest documentaries ever made,' and that remains true. What makes the film so effective is not how it looks at the Germans, a spectral presence, but how it chronicles the way that many ordinary citizens simply lived their lives as if nothing had changed. The director Marcel Ophuls, who died last year at 97, explores collaboration and resistance through the lens of a small city, Clermont-Ferrand. It's about an hour from Vichy, where the Nazis established a puppet government headed by the World War I hero Philippe Petain. Petain's former protege Charles de Gaulle fled to Britain, coordinated resistance to the Nazis, and returned to lead a...
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